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Critical Essay on "How Do I Love Thee?"

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Submitted By kparker1115
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Final Critical Essay What is love? Love knows no reasons. Love knows no lies. Love defies all reasons. Love has no eyes. Love is not blind; it sees but it doesn't mind. Love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation. Love is so easy to feel, so hard to explain; easy to get, so hard to let go; easy to spell, so hard to define. Love is an emotion that consists of three components; intimacy, passion and commitment, it is an emotional and physical feeling which takes over your whole state of mind and how you feel. There are many definitions and views of love, and the Merriam-Webster dictionary has ten definitions for love in it but it seems as though it doesn’t have any good definitions of love. However I carefully searched for an adequate definition and it was found in the most surprising place, a place that should have been the most obvious but not wanting to start controversy, I refused to see what was sitting right in front of me, a poem. One might say that a poem couldn’t possibly demonstrate the meaning of love. Conversely, many disagree; a poem could in fact demonstrate the meaning and feeling of love. A poem are the words that come from a person’s heart, mind, or soul, meaning it is personal and no one can know the true definition and meaning of something unless one has experienced it. With that being said, a poem, specifically, a poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “How Do I Love Thee?” demonstrated the preeminent meaning of love, compared to all other meanings, this definition has to be the best. This particular poem is important to study because it is popular to American poets, literature authors, and journalists. It is a famous love poem reviewed, critiqued, and interpreted by many, and majority of the people who come across it find it interesting. Personally it is interesting because of the way it is written, it is written so that the

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